Turns out Spock’s the killer. Huh.
As American Horror Story: Asylum made perfectly clear on Wednesday night, nothing good ever comes from trying to tell the truth.
But screw that, because I really need to say this: something happened over the last two episodes of Asylum that took the show back from the pits of guilty pleasures and turned it into something else altogether.
I’ll say this now — although I don’t doubt the show could prove me wrong in future installments — but at least following episode five, “I Am Anne Frank, Part Two,” Asylum has become the kind of program I am proud to refer to as “great television.”
And I don’t use the term lightly.
Now before I move on, there are some caveats to my assertion. First of all, in order to perceive this episode of Asylum as great television, you have to have watched the previous four episodes. You can’t just jump into the insanity and hope it will make sense.
Second, you kind of have to take Asylum for what it is. The show isn’t a character driven drama like Breaking Bad, but more of a sensory experience. It’s got a bit of a Twin Peaks vibe, as images, sounds, vague concepts and twisted versions of old clichés are used to paint a mood, which in most cases is discomfort and in extreme cases a bit of terror.
Furthermore, it’s possible that this praise will end up being confined to these episodes. Given the more psychological nature of the subplots on the last two episodes, there hasn’t been a lot of time for the sillier kinds of crazy that AHS generally enjoys throwing at us.
Whereas the first three weeks covered aliens, demonic possession and carnivorous man-eating monsters, both parts of “I Am Anne Frank” focused on the horrifying aspects of topics such as postpartum psychosis, Nazism and sexual sterilization.
Most of the truly fantastical horror elements faded into the background. They’re still there, but receding out of the spotlight for a couple episodes has actually let viewers become more comfortable with such bizarreness as Sister Mary Eunice’s possession and the aliens. (Granted, the aliens play a role in part two, but it’s small, so whatever.)
Finally, I will admit that when you compress all the biggest moments of “I Am Anne Frank, Part Two” down into a short list, it could come off sounding like a torture porn film, or, more specifically, torture porn focused primarily on the desecration of the female flesh.
There’s so much more than gore here, however — in fact, almost all of the gore is implied and happens more or less off screen, aside from what looks like some kind of reverse Caesarean section performed by those goddamn aliens.
Again, the theme running through “I am Anne Frank, Part Two” is that telling your version of the truth never leads to a good outcome.
Of course, most of this hinges on this week’s big reveal that the serial killer Bloody Face is none other than Dr. Oliver Thredson, the singular character on the entire show (up until now) who seemed like a normal guy, possibly even the hero.
When I say it like that it seems obvious that I should have guessed his identity in advance, but I really didn’t. The writers did an excellent job of making him a little bit of a good guy, a little bit of a sexist homophobe and a big pile of self-centered jackass, all while putting him in opposition to all the show’s worst and most evil characters. I honestly didn’t expect he was Bloody Face until the scene before the reveal.
Oliver/Bloody Face is just one big batch of lies, and so far, he’s gotten everything he wanted. Kit Walker is imprisoned for Bloody Face’s crimes, Oliver is under no suspicion and by episode’s end he has Lana Winters trapped in his chamber of horrors.
On the flipside, Kit and Lana, who both trusted Oliver, are in the worst possible position. Lana’s quest to tell the truth about Briarcliff got her interred there in the first place, but in trusting Oliver to help her escape, she only ended up in an even worse situation. (I think “chamber of horrors” is a good description of Oliver’s basement, but “human taxidermy dungeon” isn’t bad either.)
Kit has been lead to believe that the “truth” of his situation is that he really is insane and that he is indeed Bloody Face. He agrees to tell this “truth” to Oliver and have it recorded, believing it will be the piece of evidence Oliver needs to get Kit a permanent residence at Briarcliff.
The confession, however, leads to Kit’s arrest at the end of the episode. Now, instead of living out his days in a mental ward, Kit is likely going to the electric chair.
Anne Frank’s Nazi hunting plotline forms the other half of the episode, but she and Sister Jude don’t have any more luck with the truth. Anne’s attempts to tell everyone her story eventually leads to a transorbital lobotomy and Sister Jude’s attempts to out Dr. Arthur Arden as a Nazi put her in danger of losing her position as head of Briarcliff and lead her down a path unbecoming of a nun (like drinking the juice at a jazz club and getting laid).
Except for Grace’s run-in with the alien insemination squad, every plotline deals primarily with the psychology of the situations and not much in the way of the supernatural.
The episode’s opening sets the stage, with an out-of-uniform Sister Jude sneaking into an apartment building to speak with a Jewish Nazi hunter about outing Arthur. There is a palpable sense of unease throughout the scene, as the camera sways around the room like a fly, past characters and into mirrors with wild abandon.
The blocking in the scene is incredible, as sway from spot to spot, perfectly in line with the mirrors without missing a step of the dialogue.
The entire episode is a master class in upsetting cinematography. As we find out when her husband comes looking for her, Anne is really Charlotte, a housewife who lost her mind after giving birth and become obsessed with Anne Frank and the Holocaust, to point of tattooing herself with concentration camp numbers.
All the of husband’s explanatory flashback scenes have this weathered, dated feel to them, having been filmed on old, awful color film stock, with the scenes staged like a three-camera sitcom. Watching Charlotte go mad in this setting adds an eerily recognizable quality as the whole scenario was designed to appear immediately familiar to the audience (re: sitcom), despite the horror within.
Having survived his gunshot wound, Arthur convinces Anne/Charlotte’s husband to get his wife the quick fix: a transorbital lobotomy. The entire buildup to the sickening chunk of Arthur’s hammer through Anne/Charlotte’s eye is horribly unnerving, especially since the viewer can’t even think of a way in which it could have been avoided.
There’s a lot of moral ambiguity – this is chauvinistic 1964, so the husband seems like an ass for choosing the lobotomy route (especially since it was Arthur’s idea, and he is f—ing evil), but we also know from flashbacks that Anne/Charlotte tried to murder her child, her husband barely arriving in time to save it.
After the lobotomy, Anne/Charlotte is a basically a Stepford wife and we never know if she was telling the truth or not, but we do see at the end that she was right all along about Arthur being a Nazi (well, duh).
The episode’s grandest accomplishment comes from Oliver and Lana’s escape from Briarcliff. They’ve been buddying up for a few episodes, Oliver seeming almost altruistic in his motives for saving Lana. As he says at some point, she doesn’t deserve to be in there, even if she is incurably homosexual.
Very forwarding thinking for 1964.
(Side note: I know Oliver was probably just lying to Lana during all those scenes when they were trying to cure her lesbianism, but I still find it ironic that when he’s in the Blood Face costume Oliver definitely has some kind of bra or kinky top on. Gay or not, he’s crossing some kind of gender line there.)
Anyways, Oliver’s plan is to just walk out of the building, and it works, right up until the pair is almost caught by a security guard.
The whole scene you can feel the imminent danger of the situation — everyone’s lives and careers are on the line. But they make it out alive and finally arrive at Oliver’s house, followed by the best handling of the “oh shit I just realized I’m in the killer’s house” cliché I’ve seen in awhile.
Everything is fine for starters, and all of Oliver’s rules are perfectly logical — no phone calls, we’ll go to the police tomorrow, relax — and soon Lana will be able to write her Pulitzer Prize-winning article about Oliver.
Wait, what was that now?
Lana’s goal was to write the ultimate tell-all piece about Briarcliff, but Oliver slips up when he says that he’s helped her escape so she can write about him, the guy who hasn’t done anything except make her touch some other dude’s wiener.
Then Lana sees the lampshade — it’s a quick shot, but that thing definitely has a nipple on it — immediately followed by my favorite moment, when he offers her a mint from a bowl that is obviously just the top of a human skull.
Asylum can be such a slap in the face sometime — after all this, she’s walked right into Bloody Face’s lair?
Lana’s realization is so slow and painful (as is the audience’s reaction) that even the somewhat silly moment when she falls through a trapdoor in Oliver’s skin tanning closet is totally forgivable.
Next, Lana awakes in Oliver’s semi-surgical nightmare pain emporium (I definitely got it right that time) right next to the body of her lover. This all may sound like a Saw movie, but the focus here is entirely on the psychological — we don’t see any of the violence, which makes the whole thing ten times worse.
Everything is implied, and the scene ends with Oliver telling Lana that she’ll have to start making out with the body of her dead lover. Not to worry, though — Oliver has removed the woman’s teeth and put them on the Bloody Face mask. So there’s that.
The “I am Anne Frank” two-part arc is probably the best episode in the entirety of AHS. Between plot and cinematography (just watch those awesome tracking shots of Oliver), the episodes have been a joy to behold.
It’s funny because I feel as though I’ve been saying this exact same thing now for a few weeks — this show is actually getting better every episode, by leaps and bounds.
At least for the moment, we’ve slipped into the realm of “great television.” You never know with AHS, though — next week’s episode could implode completely into an orgy of bloodthirsty clowns seeking revenge on Sister Mary Eunice’s unholy vagina, utterly lacking irony.
Let’s not start concocting lies and rumors now, though. We may have no idea what’s ahead, but we can enjoy Asylum for what it is now: A program that, as of episode five, has only gotten better with age.
Tidbits:
–It’s kind of miniscule, so I didn’t get to it in the review, but arguably the best visual moment in the episode is the scene when all the little kids on the playground find Shelley the Nymphomaniac crawling towards them up a staircase. Very, very, very unsettling.
–I keep talking about Grace’s C-section, but it wasn’t really all that important. Basically, right before she’s sexually sterilized, she is visited by the aliens and Kit’s naked, pregnant, jelly-covered wife Alma. The aliens cut her open — I assume to put a baby in her — and then the next time we see her she’s bleeding out of her crotch on a couch. It’s not really clear if she got sterilized or not, but she probably did, and now she’ll be a character that is somehow both sexually sterile and pregnant (woohoo?). The important thing is that now she believes Kit’s story about the aliens. I guess.
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